A roleplaying game about being at the bottom of the food chain

Category Archives: Rules

One night, after a couple of bourbons each, we got to chatting about our plans for Goblins. We had been inspired by the release of Heros Against Darkness by Justin Halliday. His excellent role playing game had been released using a Creative Commons licence and it had got us thinking. Here was a fully thought out role playing game thoroughly put together and out there for people to play for free.

The role playing industry is too small to support all the wonderful indie games out there financially in any meaningful way. It is barely big enough to support the full time developers for big companies. We decided we’d follow Justin’s lead and release Goblins! on this site for free. When we’re done, we’ll still do a self-published hard copy of the rules (mostly for ourselves) so that people can buy a copy if they’re interested.

So, without waffling on anymore, here’s the current version of Goblins! Feel free to download and play it. Please remember, this is still a far from finished version of the game. We still have a few things to fix up. The combat chapter, for instance, is a little thin on details. We appreciate any and all feedback. You can use the comments below to let us know what you think of the game, what you think works and what you think doesn’t. Those groups who provide us significant and useful feedback will be given credits in the rule book.

Well, we thought we were doing well and were right on track. Turns out we had no idea what we were talking about. What we discovered means a total rewrite of the combat system from scratch, removing a lot of the more cliché rule systems we were using and replacing it with a much more simple, yet extremely descriptive, combat system.

The old system we were using was dice based (d12 to be precise) and was, if we are honest, pretty iterative in its workings. During several playtesting sessions we started to realise two things: Continue reading →